City on the Edge - by Jonathan Weber (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

An "absorbing" (San Fransico Chronicle) and "fascinating" (Financial Times) account of San Francisco's meteoric transformation into a global capital of technology, and how the same creative and political forces that gave rise to its boom now threaten to destroy what made it great.

At the dawn of the 1990s, San Francisco was a beautiful if troubled mid-sized metropolis. It was still reeling from the AIDS epidemic and the Lome Prieta earthquake, its economy stuck in a post-industrial slump. Once considered to be the capital of the American West, and later the beating heart of the global counterculture, the mythic, fog-shrouded city at the edge of the continent faced an uncertain future.

But in that very moment, a band of free-thinking technologists, immersed in the creative zeitgeist of the city, were inventing the contemporary internet. San Francisco would undergo an epic political, social, and economic transformation as it claimed the title of tech capital of the world. Local politicians, including Gavin Newsom and Kamala Harris, advanced to the national stage. An unlikely marriage of underground culture and technological optimism gave rise to the annual reverie known as Burning Man.

This should have been a happy story for San Francisco. But as the city's tech economy roared, a host of urban ills lurked in the shadows: homelessness, drug addiction, mental illness, and a crippling lack of new housing. The city's famously left-wing political establishment struggled to get its arms around the problems. When the pandemic arrived in 2020, it created new crises and laid old ones bare, shattering a "City Family" that had ruled politically for more than thirty years. Key leaders of the once-liberal tech industry turned sharply to the right, embracing President Trump and his war on "San Francisco values" just as the artificial intelligence revolution began to produce yet another massive financial boom.

Jonathan Weber saw it all up close as a reporter and newsroom leader. He offers a sweeping history of a city that rose to dizzying heights in the internet era, only to be battered by the heedlessness of a tech industry it did so much to spawn and politicians who had lost the plot. Drawing on 200 interviews with mayors, CEOs, political leaders, activists, entrepreneurs, and artists, City on the Edge is more than a simple chronicle of a city. It's the story of a war waged for the heart of San Francisco--one that anticipated the culture wars raging around the world. As the AI boom revs up, with San Francisco as its undisputed capital, the conflicts are playing out yet again, and will have an impact far beyond the city's famed Golden Gates.

Review Quotes

"From the beginning of the rise of the commercial Internet to today, Jonathan Weber has been in the middle of everything San Francisco-related, including technology and politics. In this beautiful book, he interweaves the two and shows how they've played off each other, both in positive and negative ways, in a city whose history is both fantastical and entertaining."
--Brad Feld, co-founder of Foundry Group and Techstars

"Having spent the 1990s and early 2000s at the heart of the story Jonathan Weber tells here--working at Wired and HotWired, living in San Francisco at the peak of the dot-com boom--you can take it from me: This book is the real deal. Imbued with insider access, outsider perspective, and Weber's prodigious story-telling gifts, City on the Edge is the definitive account of a monumental era in a mythical city and a world-changing industry that both lost their way."
--John Heilemann, #1 New York Times bestselling author of Game Change and Double Down

"Jonathan Weber tells the story of San Francisco's internet era as someone who was there and who knows everyone. He digs deep into tech, culture, and politics, revealing much that was never well known and much which has been forgotten. City on the Edge offers a story that affects the world and human history."
--Craig Newmark, founder of Craigslist

"So much that happens in the nation happens in San Francisco first. Jonathan Weber tells the city's story from the rise of the internet and the behemoth powers that followed through to the national political figures the city has spawned--with, along the way, a cast of vivid and Machiavellian behind-the-scenes players. He has made it a riveting tale and turned San Francisco into an unforgettable character."
--Michael Wolff, #1 New York Times bestselling author of Fire and Fury

"To understand the San Francisco of today, you can't do better than Jonathan Weber's chronicle of its recent decades of euphoria and disillusion. In his fast-paced narrative, Weber shrewdly navigates the city's volatile juxtaposition of transformational innovation and intractable social ills. City on the Edge is a captivating story of iron-willed idealists, inventors, activists, and power players who shaped San Francisco's contentious character, altered how we all live and work, and inflamed the most fractious political debates of our time."
--Marty Baron, author of Collision of Power and former executive editor of The Washington Post

About the Author

Jonathan Weber was named the Los Angeles Times's first-ever Silicon Valley reporter in 1990. He was later editor in chief of The Industry Standard, a chronicle of and bellwether for the first dot-com boom, and oversaw West Coast news and global technology coverage for Reuters. He was most recently the editor in chief of The San Francisco Standard.